Fergus McClelland was the last illegal major British child actor

Before Section 37 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963 was enacted it was illegal for a child under 13 to appear in a film made in Britain. As I pointed out in an earlier post, this law was widely ignored. 

And I could have added Mandy Miller to the examples given there. She was six when she made a brief appearance in The Man in the White Suit and seven when she played the title role in Mandy.

The director of both those Ealing films was Alexander Mackendrick, and he was still breaking the law when he shot Sammy Going South, because his young lead Fergus McClelland was only 11.

Though you'd think that a completed feature film would make pretty good evidence in court, producers generally avoided legal trouble by keeping their use of such a young actor secret until the film was released.

So a short article about the boy in the Daily Herald (10 January 1963) says that his three-month absence from school while he was filming on location in Africa was explained by telling his classmates that he was on an educational tour.

The article concludes by saying:

The company who made the film, Bryanston Seven Arts, could be prosecuted for employing anyone as young as Fergus in a film studio. But the maximum penalty would be only a £5 fine. And the film cost £500,000 to make.

Richard Farmer has written about this illegal employment of child actors, and he shows that companies could be fined rather more than that:

In 1949, 12-year-old Bobby Driscoll, who had already appeared in films such as Song of the South (1946) and The Window (1949), arrived in Britain to make Treasure Island for Disney at Denham. Disney did not seek to obtain the necessary employment permit for Driscoll, in large part because of his age meant that he could not legally be allowed to work in Britain.

Driscoll, his father, and Disney were each fined £100. Treasure Island’s producers reworked their schedule, at a reported cost of $84,000, to allow the young star to complete shooting as quickly as possible, claiming to have "too much money involved" in the film to replace Driscoll and concerned that he might at some point be prohibited from returning to the studio.

Farmer says the Disney company felt it was being singled out for special treatment, and you can see why. The year before, David Lean's Oliver Twist, complete with nine-year-old John Howard Davies in the title role, had been chosen for the Royal Film Performance – Davies later described being presented to Queen Mary as most terrifying experience of his life. Sammy Going South received the same accolade in 1963.

The 1963 Act allowed the employment of actors under 13, but made local authorities responsible for ensuring their welfare. This regularised what had often been happening in practice:

Some local authorities found it easier to ensure child safety in studios by coming to extra-statutory agreements with producers that permitted filmmakers to employ children on the understanding that council officers were able to ensure that a child’s welfare and education was being appropriately attended to.

And if you were working for Alexander Mackendrick, you needed protection. Fergus McClelland remembered in his 2020 interview with Matthew Sweet:

There was one point when I worked solid for 17 days from six in the morning till nine at night, and I was 11 and a half. The unit doctor said to Sandy Mackendrick, who was a fantastic director but very driven: "Look, you can either have a dead star or a live little boy. Which do you want?"

What was his answer?

What can we do to make him healthy and get him filming more?

McClelland survived the experience, acting for another 10 years before disappearing from view. He re-emerged later in life as a trainer in public speaking and business presentation, in which guise you can find him all over YouTube.

Other child stars were not so lucky. Bobby Driscoll died from drug addiction at 30 and was buried anonymously burial in a pauper's grave.

Sammy Going South and the morality of employing child actors

The director of Trouble at Townsend wasn't the only one to have problems with a child star being too well fed. I've read accounts of both Carol Reed and Andrei Tarkovsky making the same complaint.

But Alexander Mackendrick's account (from Wikpedia, with no source given) of the making of Sammy Going South suggests that Fergus McClelland didn't just get too well fed but too happy.

"He was a lean, hard, little boy. Tough as old nails ... a really strong character. He had the hunted look of an abused child, which in some ways he was. He came from a disturbed home; his parents were getting divorced and there were problems. So he was the perfect casting. 

"But when he went out to Africa, he started having the time of his life. The unit adored him and, to my dismay, started to feed him ... he put on weight and there was no way I could stop it. So, instead of this hunted and abused child, who’s supposed to be starving and neurotic, you had a sturdy, stocky, well fed little character. A good actor, but the physique betrayed itself."

McClelland talked about his experience of making the film in an interview with Matthew Sweet for BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme in 2010 – it begins at 24:14 – confirming much of what Mackendrick said. 

Fascinating as child actors can be, it's hard to escape the feeling that there's something inherently exploitative about their employment.

Mackendrick made the film for Michael Balcon's Bryanston Film's – Balcon had been his boss at Ealing Studios. Mark Duguid has suggested:

Balcon saw the story as a heartwarming tale of a young innocent's triumph over adversity, against the fantastic scenery of the African continent. Characteristically, Mackendrick's understanding was altogether darker: he saw it as "the inward odyssey of a deeply disturbed child, who destroys everybody he comes up against".

Mackendrick's attempt to satisfy these two interpretations is probably the reason the film doesn't quite succeed.

A motif Mackendrick's was innocent characters who caused chaos and destruction – think of Mrs Wilberforce in The Ladykillers – so it's no surprise he was attracted to W.T. Canaway's original novel. Ironically, you could say the book managed to strike the balance between his and Balcon's ambitions that the film failed to find.

The original cut produced by Mackendrick was severely trimmed before release, and cut again for the US market. There it was given the ludicrous title A Boy Ten Feet Tall, apparently because it was feared white audiences would assume a film called Sammy Going South was about a black boy and stay away.

Sammy Going South is worth watching for its rare reference to the Suez Crisis in British films or novels and for about the last treatment in a film of British colonial Africa. Sammy's parents are killed in a British raid on Port Said, and he sets out to walk to the only other relative he knows, who lives in Durban in South Africa.

And Fergus McClelland's Sammy makes a credible and winning protagonist, even if Mackendrick was right to despair that he looks healthier and happier as his trek goes on.

Professor Strange: Victorians, modesty and table legs

Long ago, in its February 2004 issue to be precise, I wrote an occasional humorous column for Clinical Psychology Forum under the name Professor Strange. As I still come across people who are quite convinced that the Victorians thought table legs indecent, I am repeating it here.

I doubt you will find anything like this in Clinical Psychology Forum today, but Professor Strange is an ancestor for the columns I now write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Victorians, modesty and table legs

The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.

Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.

Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?

You are not alone. An Australian website on sexuality and modernity is convinced they did. Another on culture and colonisation reports that ‘An era that could wrap table and piano legs with frilled covers that men may not harbour “certain” ideas is incredible, to say the least.” 

How true! For something does not fit when a website on the Victorian pantomime tells us that “audiences were not accustomed to viewing the legs of a pretty actress, especially in an era when even piano legs were cloaked for modesty's sake! However, in a male or ‘Breeches’ role, the actresses were allowed to display as much leg as they dared.’

So piano legs have to be swathed but, in certain circumstances it is fine for human legs to be displayed? The Victorians I knew were odd, but not that odd.

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boot.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the strait-laced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go that the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.

After reading this column you will never think of Barbara Cartland in the same way again

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Another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Barbara Cartland has her own label on this column, and I think all this material had appeared on Liberal England before, but I suspect it is not common knowledge among radical mental health professionals.

Barbara Cartland as a political activist

The writer Damian Le Bas once interviewed a man whose mother, a Conservative county councillor, had fought for travelling families to have somewhere to live and for their children to be educated. 

"People offer all sorts of reasons why they don’t want a Gypsy site near them,” said Le Bas. "You’ve referred to it as old-fashioned racism, and your mother compared it with the situation in the South of the United States of America."

The man replied: “It was definitely prejudice. It was really, really nasty. My mother had a lot of hate mail and people were rude to her, but she persevered. She was not one to be deterred, my mother, in any way. She stuck to her guns."

Her name? Barbara Cartland.

When I told someone who I was writing this column about, they dredged up Clive James’s description of her on television in old age:

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

But then if Barbara Cartland is remembered at all today, it is for this late eccentricity of appearance. 

Matthew Sweet, who is writing her biography, has observed that, though you would expect her romantic novels, of which there were hundreds, dictated from a chaise-longue to relays of secretaries, to be a staple of charity shops, but they have not lasted. Not lasted physically, that is: they were cheaply produced and fell apart in the hands of a vigorous reader.

So, though Barbaraville Camp, a permanent site for Gypsies on the outskirts of Hatfield named in her honour, is still open, we have to look further back to pay Barbara Cartland her due.

******

The hero of The Glamour Boys, Chris Bryant’s study of the group of gay – if that’s not an anachronism – MPs who opposed appeasement in the run up to World War II, was meant to be Major Ronald Cartland, who died at Dunkirk aged 33. But doesn’t his sister keep breaking into the story?

Their father’s death had left Barbara and her two brothers in straitened circumstances, but they weren’t for long once she started writing. First there was a racy High Society novel with a fair amount of sexual innuendo, Jig-saw (1923), then a column for the Daily Express and risqué plays, one of which was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain.

Bryant writes:

Barbara was no prude. She wrote wry and naughty copy for Bystander under the pseudonyms Miss Hamilton or Caviare, she turned out gossipy pieces for Tatler as Miss Scott and passed on titbits of society news as Miss Tudor in the Daily Mail. The copy she filed was invariably bubbly and enthusiastic, with no hint of the prim coyness that was so common at the time. Her advice to young women in her book of modern morals, Touch the Stars: A clue to happiness, was remarkable: 

Remember that you are not a miserable sinner… nor were you born in original sin; the sex instinct is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It is sent to inspire us, and help us understand Nature and the workings of the Divine. It is the nearest approach we get to the beauty, the intensity and the power of Life.

And in between all this writing, she found time to be the darling of the fast set at Brooklands motor racing circuit and a pioneer of gliding.

******

What first made me take Barbara Cartland seriously were her wartime memoirs, The Years of Opportunity, as they showed her to be a notably sensible voice in welfare work.

She defended servicewomen, saying the remarkable thing was how few unwanted babies there had been, given wartime conditions. And when women did become pregnant:

It was nearly always a case of being brought up in ignorance, of being given a new and exciting freedom in the Services, and often of being “stood a drink” for the first time in their lives! Many of them didn't know what was wrong with them, and when the Medical Officer told them they were going to have a baby they were stunned and astonished.

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Not that the men were much better informed:

I know one RAF padre who had a straight talk with every man on his station who came to him wanting to get married or in domestic trouble. He said the abysmal ignorance of the average man about women and love was appalling.

She also wrote with understanding and compassion about the needs of children, particularly those in public care. In 1945, the death of Dennis O’Neill, a 12-year-old foster child, on a farm in Shropshire had scandalised the nation:

How many Dennis O’Neills who don’t actually die are living a life of cruelty and torture, of privation and utter hopeless misery? How many little boys and girls are existing in filth and degradation in Public Institutions without any knowledge that there is love and kindness in a world which to them is only harsh and horrible?

She remembered a little boy who had come from a public institution to live in the cottage next to hers:

He was three years old, but he had never seen a toy of any sort, and when my boys gave him some of theirs, he didn’t know what to do with them. 

One of those boys was Ian McCorquodale, who was interviewed by Damian Le Bas.

And Cartland writes of her friend Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who deserves a column of her own: 

As chairman of the Nursing School Association she visited homes and institutions and what she found was appalling.

It wasn’t all words either. In this volume of memoirs Cartland describes bursting into a stranger's hotel room to stop a little girl being beaten.

******

The moral of this story is that someone who ends their days on television in a pink chiffon ballgown and caked with make-up – as I fully intend to do – can still be worthy of your respect.

Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf and fame in the social media age

Naomi Klein, an unimpeachably radical writer whose first book No Logo I enjoyed back in the year 2000 or thereabouts, has a problem. A writer called Naomi Wolf, who used to tackle similar political subjects from a similar standpoint, has become a darling of the MAGA crowd. You name an absurd Trumpian theory, she believes in it wholeheartedly.

In the the introduction to her latest book, Doppelganger, Klein explains how she has been mistaken for the "other Naomi" and chronically confused with her for over a decade. "I have been confused with Other Naomi for so long and so frequently that I have often felt that she was following me."

She also has a lot of illuminating things to say about fame in the social media age:

People ask me variations on this question often: What drove her over the edge? What made her lose it so thoroughly? They want a diagnosis but I, unlike her, am uncomfortable playing doctor. 

I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown. And there would be some truth to that bit of math.

The more I learn about her recent activities, however, the less I am able to accept the premise of these questions. They imply that when she went over the edge, she crashed to the ground. 

A more accurate description is that Wolf marched over the edge and was promptly caught in the arms of millions of people who accept every one of her extraordinary theories without question and who appear to adore her. So, while she clearly has lost what I may define as "it," she has found a great deal more – she has found a whole new world. 

Feminists of my mother's generation find Wolf's willingness to align herself with the people waging war on women's freedom mystifying. And on one level it is. As recently as 2019 Wolfe described her ill-fated book Outrageous as a cautionary tale about what happens when the secular state gets the power to enter your bedroom. Now she is in league with the people who stacked the US supreme Court with wannabe theocrats whose actions are forcing preteens to carry babies against their will. 

Yet on another level her actions are a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy which have trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Viewers? Did it trend? 

These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic, it generates in the ether. And if volume is the name of the game, these crossover stars who find new levels of celebratory on the right aren't lost – they are found.

The talk of "public humiliation" and her "ill-fated book Outrageous" is a reference to an appearance on BBC Radio's Free Thinking programme, where this blog's hero Matthew Sweet pointed out that a major theme of it was based on a misunderstanding of 19th-century British legal records.

Another myth that should die: The Victorians covered table legs because they thought were indecent

I think this one is less widely believed than it was, but it never does any harm to give it a hoofing. No, the Victorians did not cover table legs and piano legs because they thought they were indecent.

For a witness let's summon Professor Strange, under whose name I contributed a few columns to Clinical Psychology Forum. This one was in the February 2004 issue:

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boots.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go than the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

The truth - and this is me, as Mike Yarwood used to say - is that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we moderns imagine. They were, for instance, much more relaxed about male nudity than we are. 

Here's Ronald Hyam writing in his Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience:

Not until 1890 did the Amateur Swimming Association rule that bathing drawers must be worn in competitive schoolboy racing. Cambridge and (even more successfully) Oxford were among the last pockets of resistance to swimming costumes.

Gwen Raverat's rhapsodies about nude swimming in the River Cam reflected a dying practice. It was frowned on by the city fathers after 1894 and finally banned from the town bathing sheds in 1910, although screened and segregated nude sunbathing survived until (ironically) the mid-1960s.

The Englishman in the High Castle

An Englishman's Castle was a three-part BBC drama that starred Kenneth More and was screened in 1978. It was set in an alternate 1978 where Britain had been conquered by Nazi Germany.

I don't remember it from the time and have long wanted to watch it. The other day I found all three parts on YouTube, namely:

• part 1
  
• part 2
• part 3

If you want a blow-by-blow account, then Archive TV Musings is the site for you. Here I offer some more random thoughts.

To begin, I have a Kenneth More problem: I don't like him when he plays the hero. I'm reminded of Matthew Sweet and his comment on A Night to Remember: 

You almost get the feeling watching A Night To Remember that the ship goes down simply to wipe the smug grin off of Kenneth More's face.

and also of his comment on More's onscreen character in general:

He was heroic in a cocky, big-brotherly way - like a public-school prefect who might have saved a new boy from a beating, but expected three terms of shoe-polishing and crumpet-toasting in return.

But the older, compromised More we see here is more to my taste. He plays the scriptwriter of a popular television drama called An Englishman's Castle, which is set in the recent past and is reaching the time of the German invasion of Britain. 

This, and the complications of his personal life, suddenly make it harder for him to please the viewing public without upsetting the authorities. Up till now, he has made the compromises that allowed him to walk this tightrope.

Then there is the brilliance with which an authoritarian state is conjured up without showing us anything. The violence all takes place offscreen and everyone running things is British. The only German we see is an amiable young soldier who appears in the drama within the drama.

And then there's the cast. More's wife is played by Kathleen Byron, the mad nun from Black Narcissus. The controller of the television channel is Anthony Bate, soon to play Sir Oliver Lacon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. One of More's sons, though he's not at his best here, is Nigel Havers.

In the minor roles are two figures with pleasing trivial connections. Jonathan Kydd, the son of the actor Sam Kydd, appears on one of my regular podcast listens - Chelsea Fancast - every week. 

While the young German soldier is played by Louis Sheldon. As Louis Sheldon Williams he was one of the children in Our Mother's House and, better still, his mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the 1960s.

If you click play on the video at the top, you'll soon see a scene between Kenneth More and Anthony Bate. If you like it, I think you'll like the whole thing.

The Joy of Six 1298

"Starmer was attempting a card trick that mainstream political parties across the West have tried to play in recent years - defeat the hard-right by borrowing their talking points and framing, and then somehow prove that you are better able to deal with this problem than they are." Matt Carr has no confidence in Keir Starmer's attempt to meet the Reform challenge to Labour.

"Syrians are under no illusion that the future will be hard, complicated and may end up being disappointing and even dangerous. Please can we all do them the courtesy of wishing them well, and offering support if it is requested, rather than writing them off now before they’ve even finished freeing and identifying the prisoners from Assad’s concentration camps?" Jonathan Brown calls for optimism about Syria.

Christine Jardine argues that hate crime legislation is not the right way to tackle sexism: "Having once felt the hate crime route was best, I now find the counter argument compelling. It is not just the worst cases – physical and verbal attacks or domestic abuse – that are the end result of misogynistic behaviour. It is everywhere, every day in so many ways."

"Conspiracy theories are not the reason Trump was elected. They are more like the oil that makes the process smoother or faster. What is really being described in the election result is not an electorate declaring it believes every line about theories of secret power structures running the world, but it is an expression of deep disillusionment: how it is to feel disenfranchised, to be poor, that the future is bleaker than the past." Gabriel Gatehouse and Matthew Sweet discuss what America’s rampant conspiracy culture means for truth and democracy now that some of its leading proponents may soon be in office.

Henrietta Billings, director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, on why the Oxford Street M&S demolition decision exposes a broken planning system and how we need urgent reform to safeguard heritage assets and reduce embodied carbon emissions.

Judit Polgar, the strongest ever woman chess player, calls for the abolition of separate titles (such as woman grandmaster), with lower qualifying standards, for women players. Though they were introduced to encourage women players, she believes they tend to limit their ambition.

Victorian women in crinolines were the ultimate fashion victims

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Content warning: This is a horrible passage of 19th-century history.

A number of factors combined in crinolines to make them a ridiculously dangerous death trap for anyone wearing them. During the peak of their popularity they killed at least 3000 people in the UK alone according to an 1860 article in the Lancet, and in 1864 a Bulgarian doctor reported that over the previous 14 years he believed that at least 39,927 women had died in crinoline fires.

This is from a horrifying article in the Christmas Fortean Times. Crinolines - stiff petticoats worn to hold out a skirt - were the height of fashion for women from the 1840s to the 1860s, and enjoyed intermittent revivals later in the century. Latterly, a metal frame replaced most of the petticoats.

They were such a fire hazard for two reasons. First, the skirt above became huge and unwieldy, so it was easy for a woman to brush against a fire or lighted candle. Second, the crinolines themselves were made of swathes of light, gauzy material, none of it treated to make it fire resistant.

The result is that the article, The Crinoline Inferno by Ian Simmons, is stuffed with barely credible horrors. One such runs:

In another incident in 1861 an entire corps de ballet - seven dancers in total, including the four English Gale sisters - died together when they tried to help each other after one dancer's costume ignited at the Continental Theatre in Philadelphia.

And that was nothing to the 126 people, mainly aristocratic ladies wearing highly flammable crinolines and corset, who died in a fire at the 1897 Bazaar de la Charité. Still less to the two or three thousand who died in the 1863 Church of the Company fire in Santiago.

Fashionable victims included:

the teenage Archduchess Mathilde of Austria, who died when she was surprised smoking by her father and hid the cigarette behind her back touching her dress as she did so and going up in flames instantly. 

Two illegitimate half-sisters of Oscar Wilde also died after crinoline fires - "both died a lingering death several days later". Little was said about their deaths as their father, a prominent Dublin doctor, did not want to draw attention to the family and its scandals.

As a result, the tale remained part of the secret folklore of Dublin for many years, growing in the telling to include a mysterious black-draped woman who regularly visited the girls' grave and. later. their father on his deathbed. It is not clear whether Oscar knew of his sisters' fate. or indeed their existence.

A further hazard was added when the colour Paris Green became fashionable in women's fashion. The die that produced it included arsenic, and women became ill through poisoning just from wearing this shade as a result.

Finally, the crinoline remained lethal even in the 20th century. In 1930 Nita Foy, a dancer appearing in a period film at Twickenham Studios, died in crinoline fire after her costume brushed against an electric fire in the dressing room of one of the actors. The room, says Matthew Sweet in his Shepperton Babylon, became a site of ghoulish pilgrimage.

Proof that Bluesky is primmer than the Victorians

I'm close to completing that Book Challenge meme:

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

You can see my choices so far on Twitter and Bluesky.

One of them is Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet. Not only is it beautifully written, it also reinforced a view I had come to not long before I encountered it: namely, that the Victorians were far less Victorian that we imagine. 

The caricatured view we have formed of them serves a way of congratulating ourselves for not being like that. Notably, while the Victorians were horribly repressed when it came to sex, we are wonderfully liberated.

In reality the idea of covering table legs for the sake of decency, for instance, was a joke that 19th-century Britons told at the expense of the straitlaced Americans.

So I was amused that the cover of Inventing the Victorians, which features a chaste Victorian nude, was flagged on Bluesky as 'Adult Content'. Users of the platform have to click on this warning to view the naughty image.

I've no quarrel with Bluesky doing this: you can override the setting if you wish and many people have signed up with them because they want a more civilised place to hang out than Twitter is now.

But this flag does tend to support the thesis of the book it is worried about.

Matthew Sweet on conspiracy theorists and the media

FRDH Podcast with Michael Goldfarb · How Do You Know for Sure? Conspiracy and the Media

This new edition of Michael Goldfarb's FRDH ('The First Rough Draft of History') podcast is well worth listening to.

Matthew Sweet explains how knowledge is intentionally corrupted by conspiracy friendly media and why people embrace these ideas.

Talking of Dr Sweet, this is a chance for me to recommend his book Inventing the Victorians, which shares my view that the Victorians were a lot less Victorian than we imagine.

I may be related to one of the Tollesbury Cannibals

When Lord Bonkers was putting together a crew for the narrow boat Flower of Rutland five summers ago, he wrote:

Finally, we have a Well-Behaved Orphan as cabin boy so that (as is traditional) we have someone to eat in case of emergency - not that there is much meat on him if I am honest.

Where did Bonkers - where did I - get the idea that it is traditional for sailors to eat the cabin boy in extremis?

I suspect it was from a folk memory this case:

In 1884, the yacht Mignonette, on passage from Tollesbury, in Essex, to Sydney, Australia, met heavy weather in the South Atlantic. Caught by an enormous breaking wave, the yacht foundered, and her professional crew (which was delivering the boat to its new Australian owner) took to the 13-foot dinghy, where they drifted for three weeks on the empty ocean under a hot and cloudless sky. 

On the 24th day of their ordeal, the cabin boy, Richard Parker, 17 years old, accepted his fate as the first to go, and the captain did the deed. The survivors dined gratefully on the boy's remains.

That post from a Yachting & Boating World forum goes on to say that a German ship eventually rescued the three survivors and took them back to England. There, two were tried for murder and that trial was a sensation of the day:

The captain and mate of the Mignonette were found guilty of murder, sentenced to death, and then granted a royal pardon. It seems the sympathy of the court (and British public opinion) was with them, but a guilty verdict was required to prove that the long arm of the law can extend far out to sea.

This is not wholly correct: a paper about the case from the Saint Louis University Law Journal says:

The Home Office decided that the sentence should be commuted to six months imprisonment, but 'not at hard labour.'

I came across this case for the first time yesterday when I opened The Invention of Essex: The Making of an English County by Tim Brooks in Waterstones and looked up Tollesbury in the index, to be confronted with the entry 'Tollesbury Cannibals'.

Tollesbury, because one of my grandmothers (my mother's mother, who died just before I was born) came from there. Her maiden name was Carter.

The captain of the Mignonette on her voyage to Australia was Thomas Dudley. He had been born at Tollesbury, the home village of his mother, who died when he was six years old.

Her name? Susannah Carter.

******

I went back to Waterstones today, only to find that someone had bought the book.

You can hear Tim Brooks talking about Essex in a recent edition of Matthew Sweet's BBC Radio 3 programme Free Thinking.

Incidentally, there were also Tollesbury Pirates in the 19th century. It looks like I'm related to one of them too.

Another myth about the Victorians: the Frozen Charlotte doll

The Victorians didn't cover piano legs out of prudishness: that was a joke they told at the expense of straitlaced Americans.

They didn't pose their dead relatives in family photographs and there was no such thing as Brown Windsor soup.

I've just come across another example of spurious 19th-century history: the Frozen Charlotte doll.

Bonnie Taylor-Blake sets out the myth:

Innumerable websites, newspaper articles, magazines, and scholarly pieces tell us that 19th-century American parents gave their children small, rigid, pale-white porcelain dolls named after Charlotte, a vain young woman who rejected her mother’s advice to dress more warmly and who consequently froze to death in an open sleigh on her way to a ball. 

Further, the theme holds that Victorian children recognized the symbolism inherent in these small, corpse-like dolls and used them as playthings, sometimes even placing them in tiny coffins. 

In fact, we’re told that the motif of this particular frozen woman was so pervasive in the 19th century that our counterparts named a dessert after her and baked representations of her into cakes.

And then she demolishes it:

Today we accept these claims because this bizarre narrative fits with our perception of Victorians as moralising and obsessed by death. 

But this specifically modern belief falls apart when it becomes apparent that no one has provided contemporaneous evidence that Victorian parents and children viewed small china dolls as the fabled Charlotte. 

And a survey of American newspapers, magazines, and books of the period fails to find 19th- and early 20th-century mentions of dolls named 'Frozen Charlottes.'

She goes on to speculate on how this false history came about:

Once doll collectors in the mid-20th-century connected the stiff, pale-white female figurine of the 1850s with the 19th-century legend and ballad and casually introduced the consequent nickname to the public, we invented complex death-inspired histories for the doll, the adults who purchased her, and the children who played with her. 

In the end, while there is no real harm in referring to a penny doll as a Frozen Charlotte, we should at least be clear about the doll’s original place in American popular culture: for Victorians these were inexpensive, accessible playthings, easily lost and easily replaced, and not much more.

If you are interested in the theory that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we imagine, I recommend Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians.

The Joy of Six 1052

Basic Income Conversation and Compass have published new research modelling a fiscally neutral basic income that could reverse the poverty and inequality rises of the last 45 years.

Maxim Osipov describes the journey of those, like him, who chose exile rather than remaining as their country invaded Ukraine: "On the way to the airport, you drove through Moscow. Although this is where you were born, where you studied and lived, it has long been enemy territory. Parting with people is hard, nearly impossible; parting with Moscow is easy." 

"You might imagine that more conventional forms of modern therapy as delivered by a psychologist, counsellor or clinical social worker cannot be harmful because the treatments involve ‘just talking’. Regrettably, this is not the case." Yevgeny Botanovis, Alexander Williams and John Sakalukis on the drive to identify psychotherapeutic approaches that are not only ineffective but actively harmful.

The brainchild of Orkney-born musician Merlyn Driver, Simmerdim: Curlew Sounds is a multi-artist album inspired by the Eurasian curlew. Such celebrations inspire us to protect what we have, says Karen Lloyd.

Paul English reports on the search for the Glasgow Garden Festival: "A team of archaeologists is beginning an excavation in the only remaining part of the 120-acre site in search of touchstones evoking memories of the six-month festival that ran between spring and autumn in 1988." 

We all know  Margaret Rutherford's father murdered his own father (who was Tony Benn's great-grandfather) by banging him repeatedly on the head with a chamber-pot in Matlock. Matthew Sweet dives deep into the case.

Colin Blunstone: Caroline Goodbye

Talking Pictures TV is always discussed by the press in terms of nostalgia, but the old British films it specialises in are not as tame and twee as we are told.

Matthew Sweet once wrote:

Observe, say, 1950s Britain through its top-of-the-bill films and it emerges as a land populated by pipe-smoking, twentysomething men who drive vintage Bentleys, usually with Muriel Pavlow in the back. 

Explore it from the bottom of the bill and you'll encounter something different: tracts of featureless industrial estates, a world in which Wolseley police cars clatter under railway bridges in Croydon and mid-price actors occupy frowsty suburban drags. 

It is threadbare, unspectacular territory, where compromised people spend their time committing adultery and double-crossing each other, often while drinking pre-mixed American cocktails.

And what strikes me about those top-of-the-bill films is how vividly the villains are painted. Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp, for instance, remains sexy and dangerous more than 70 years on.

The good young character he is contrasted with, a trainee constable played by Jimmy Hanley, appears utterly insipid, but then I suspect he did when the film was released.

Other villains from this era to seek out are Peter Sellers (playing it utterly straight and with a Liverpool accent) in Never Let Go (1960) and Ronald Ward in Ealing's racing drama The Rainbow Jacket (1954):

"There's a certain gentleman I know - using the term in its widest sense - who wouldn't be at all pleased if you were to win the Leger on Fair Noon."

Talking Pictures TV's latest enterprise is Friday evening's Cellar Club, a slot for British cult cinema. It's introduced by Caroline Munro, singer, model, Bond girl and star of many such films.

She was also the inspiration for this week's music video. Colin Blunstone, the lead singer of The Zombies, explains:

When I wrote Caroline Goodbye, it was about my girlfriend, the Bond girl Caroline Munro.  I didn’t want everyone to know who it was about, so I tried to find another name, but nothing fitted. 

I admitted defeat and thought that only my close friends would know it was Caroline. However, a journalist found out and I ended up with a two-page spread in the Daily Express, so the secret was out. 

Imagine being derailed with Jacob Rees-Mogg

Photo from Network Rail

Jacob Rees-Mogg's public personality is as carefully constructed as that of any film star.

So lazy satirists who think they can hurt him by making jokes about him being old fashioned are missing the point. The overegged quaintness is a way of disguising Rees-Mogg's real nature as a thoroughly 21st-century financier.

Another important aspect of that constructed personality is its sheer disagreeability to anyone of a remotely liberal sensibility. "You may dislike me," it seems to say, "but there's nothing you can do about me."

In part Rees-Mogg is playing the public school buck he never was. Because it appears he was seen as a joke by the other boys during his Eton years.

And Matthew Sweet has said that when he heard Rees-Mogg speaking at the Oxford Union he thought he was someone doing a comic turn to send up the politicos. Well, it was an act.

Of course, you can go too far. In November 2019 he said that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire had died because they failed to show "common sense" by following the authories' instructions to stay put and wait to be rescued.

Following an outcry, Rees-Mogg apologised and was then hidden from the voters in the general election campaign.

But that didn't prevent his being reappointed leader of the Commons after the Conservative victory, so the episode cost him nothing.

My own very limited experience of being involved in an emergency taught me that the last thing, the very last thing, you want in such circumstances is someone lounging about and telling you, in an affected upper-class drawl, to ignore the instructions you are given.

I remember, after the train had come to a halt, that we all sat there wondering what happened next. Soon flashing blue lights appeared on a distant road and we knew that someone had taken charge.

As we climbed down from the train, the police and fire brigade were exaggeratedly insistent that we took our time and took care. They did not want some falling, breaking a leg and making the incident more serious.

My conclusion is that an emergency, whether a minor derailment or a global pandemic, is not an opportunity to display your superiority or you individuality. It is a time to do as you're told.

Introducing Ealing Studios

This video was made by the British Film Institute. Its blurb on YouTube runs:

What makes a film an 'Ealing' film?  Why should we cry at 'Mandy'? What has 'The Man in the White Suit' got to do with the atomic bomb? And what might Ealing films teach us about the world today? 

In this short video find out why Ealing Studios are so important in the history of filmmaking with broadcaster Matthew Sweet and BFI curator Mark Duguid.

Taking The Goodies seriously

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I was sad to hear of the death of Tim Brooke-Taylor. He is one of those comic figures who has always been there as far as I am concerned. I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. The Goodies. I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

The Goodies was one of my favourite shows when I was a young teenager and I now suspect that is the age you had to be to enjoy it. There were some repeats a few years ago and the quality of them was desperately uneven.

But when the three of them - Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie - appeared with Matthew Sweet on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking a couple of years ago, they made a strong case that The Goodies raised political issues that the BBC was often wary of covering elsewhere.

Listen to the programme.

The Victorians did not photograph corpses as part of family groups

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One of the themes I return to is that the Victorians were less Victorian than we think.

They did not cover piano legs out of a misplaced sense of modesty - that was a joke they told about the straitlaced Americans - and they were a lot more laid back about male nudity than we were.

Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians is very good on our misunderstanding of the 19th century.

Of late a new myth has been spreading. It is that the Victorians photographed corpses as part of family groups. BBC News did its bit to help it circulate three years ago.

The Victorian Book of the Dead was damning:

The BBC should be ashamed of itself for printing a piece that looks like it had been researched on Buzzfeed or its ilk. 

The article claims as post-mortems photographs of persons who are patently not dead, states that an obvious pre-mortem of a dying woman has had its eyes painted open, does not cite sources except a single mention of an Australian library, and, most damningly, repeats a canard that has been refuted again and again, about the dead being propped in a standing position for a post-mortem photo.

It also points us to a site that debunks the idea of Victorian postmortem photos:

This website is dedicated to discrediting the myth of the stand alone Victorian postmortem photo.  It explores the reasons why so many intelligent people believe that life-like standing postmortem photos exist and it helps answer some questions that many people have about this fascinating subject.

Jon Pertwee: "A sort of British icon"

To celebrate Jon Pertwee's 100th birthday, Matthew Sweet chats to 'Gotham' star Sean Pertwee about his father's legacy as the third Doctor. The two of them were filming for an upcoming box set.

I can also recommend the documentary about Jon Pertwee's career that Sean has narrated for BBC Radio 4. Catch it while it is available.

Jon Pertwee was my Doctor and it was a great era, though Roger Delgado and the Brigadier had a great deal to do with that too.

Worzel Gummidge was also wonderful - at once comforting and unsettling.

I remember liking The Navy Lark as a small boy and it is now a staple of BBC Radio 4 Extra. I struggle with it today, but it is clear the audience was having a whale of a time.

Pertwee, who taught escape techniques for naval intelligence during the war, was a remarkable man and part of a remarkable generation.